Home

Reviews

Media

Top Banned Books List

Book censorship has been haunting readers and authors for hundreds of years. From time to time books are banned by governments and religious groups or variety of reasons. We are trying to come up with a list of banned books and why they were banned.

The banned books existed from the time of their occurrence and if you look at your book shelf, you will surely find some that for one reason or another, were censored.

There were various reasons to ban books, however the books mentioned in this list were banned despite millions of people loving them.

This article tells about the books that have been banned but that are definitely worth reading.

This is a partially autobiographical novel about the events of the First World War in Italy. It was published in 1929 and immediately aroused controversy: in Boston it was seized from kiosks for sexual, "vulgar" content, and in Italy - for the army retreat description at the Battle of Caporetto.

This may sound surprising, but "Alice in Wonderland" was banned in China in 1931, as the governor of Hunan province has established the rule that the animals cannot use human language and threatened death to anyone who dares to equate humans and animals.

Exciting and bleak picture of life on the German front during the First World War in his novel was seen by many critics as a major anti-war thought. It was banned, and in 1933 - 1945 years in Nazi Germany it was burned.

Because of the scenes of sophisticated violence the novel "American Psycho" was the obvious target for censorship. It is still prohibited in the Australian state of Queensland. It is packed and sealed with the stamp «R18» (category restrictions applied by the Australian Film Classification and literature) in the rest of Australia and New Zealand and the sale was strictly limited in Germany in 1990.

Based on a true story of gay penguins from the New York Zoo, this innocent children's book angered a multitude of organizations, libraries and individuals in all the United States. It often appears in the list of banned books for different reasons being described as “anti-family” and “unsuitable for the given age”.

The allegorical story by George Orwell about corruption in Soviet Russia was banned in the Soviet Union until 1980. The story in it is carried out on behalf of the animal farm farmstead. Due to talking pigs as contradiction to Islamic values it is also banned in schools of United Arab Emirates in 2002.

A “Diary of a young girl” is a real diary of Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager, who hid from the Nazis with her family during World War II. She died in a concentration camp, but her diary was published posthumously. Various organizations argued about it in the United States, including members of the commission on textbooks Alabama who claimed it to be “a real downer”.

Ironically, this novel about banning books in a fantastic community leading consumer lifestyle, published in 1953, was banned itself on several occasions: in 1990 it was banned in one of the school districts in the United States for use of the word "damn" and previously it is also argued about because of “problematic issues’ (censorship, repression and religion are only some of them).

How many of these banned books have you already read?

Do you know of any other good book that was banned? Please share with us in comments section and we will surely try to include it in this list of banned books.

This article is contributed by Hilda Simpson. Hilda is a freelance writer for globalessays.org